What happened to Holly White?
Private investigator reviews missing woman’s phone, computer searches
Another year has passed and Holly Alcott White’s disappearance in May 2016 remains one of Taos County’s most vexing unsolved mysteries.
New Mexico State Police now considers the question of whatever happened to the former office manager for the Taos Center for the Arts to be a cold case. But Elaine Graves, the private investigator who has been looking for White for nearly four years, says she’ll “never stop looking for Holly.”
It’s a job she says she can’t do alone. Every year around the anniversary of White’s disappearance, she urges the Taos community to send her any new information that might result in a break in the case.
“I know it’s been awhile, but think back to around the time of Cinco de Mayo, around the time of Mother’s Day in 2016,” Graves said, “and just try and remember what you were doing and if anything seemed odd or out of place or anything like that. I’ll take anything at this point. Even if you don’t think it’s important, it could be a piece of the puzzle that I’m sitting here waiting for that nobody knows is important but me.”
In recent months Graves has been searching through White’s phone and computer data, hoping to find something – a telling Google search, perhaps – that might hint at what happened to White. Did she commit suicide? Did she deliberately disappear? Did someone kill White? Graves has considered all possibilities, but like everything else that has seemed like a lead in the past, nothing on White’s phone or computer has turned up any clue as to what happened to her four years ago.
Graves, who grew up in Taos and runs her private investigation business out of Santa Fe, was first hired to search for White six months after she was reported missing on May 6, 2016, well after the first 48 hours when professionals consider it at all likely a missing person will be found alive.
At the time, White was a few months from turning 50 and was planning to move to Albuquerque to join her husband, Jeff White, after many years in Taos. She had a new job waiting for her in the city and a farewell party was planned for her at the TCA, where she had worked for 22 years. The morning she went missing, White had been scheduled to go for a walk with her close friend, Cynthia Arvidson, but never made it.
In her home in Taos, law enforcement found many personal belongings. White’s purse was in the kitchen. Her dog was also still in the house.
When White’s blue Ford Escape was found parked in the Río Grande Gorge Bridge parking lot, her disappearance seemed to have a simple explanation: that she must have jumped to her death from the high bridge, which many others have done over the years. But White’s body has never been found. No sign of her remains has turned up in the water or on the banks, despite a halfdozen searches of the gorge and its surroundings and numerous rafters passing through the canyon each season.
Graves organized one of these seaches herself using cadaver dogs, but to no avail.
“I do get really, really frustrated at times,” Graves said. “There’s such a roller coaster of emotions, and frustration is just what keeps coming up. There’s frustration. There’s disappointment. Sometimes it’s just tough to go forward, especially when you’re working with the families. Their hearts have been ripped out. Unlike law enforcement, [which] can keep at a distance, I’m in the middle of it.
To this day, four years later, I talk to Holly’s dad maybe every other day. We’re still close.”
White’s case is not the only one Graves is handling. In April, she was hired to search for Melissa Crabtree, a local musician and rafting guide whose vehicle was also found near the bridge.
Initially, Graves thought the two cases might be related, but law enforcement later revealed that Crabtree suffered from Lyme disease that had spread to her brain. Crabtree’s friends said her mental health had deteriorated. She had expressed a desire to commit suicide and had even gone to the bridge in the past in an attempt to kill herself, according to Peter Crabtree, her brother. Graves said that a close friend of Crabtree’s saw her after she was officially reported missing.
“Melissa’s family is really convinced that she’s alive and that she’s in Taos somewhere and so the Taos Mountain Casino was generous enough to donate their billboard right in town,” Graves said. “They donated that billboard so that we can put up pictures of missing people in the Taos area.”
Aside from White and Crabtree, there are eight other men and women still missing from Taos County, according to the New Mexico Department of Public Safety.
Graves said she’s currently handling four missing persons cases in Northern New Mexico but didn’t say whether any of them is on the official list.
While some remain mysteries, Graves has found some of them, which gives her hope that White and Crabtree might also be located one day.
“There was a woman who came to my attention that she had a huge presence on Facebook and then all of a sudden it just stopped,” Graves said. “Her friends contacted me to say that she just disappeared and walked away from her life.”
After Graves put the call out, the missing woman made contact with her friends to say she was all right and had been living with family in another state.
“That was one of those cases that had a really nice happy ending,” Graves said. “You just live for cases like that.”
Tips on Graves’ cases can be submitted by calling (575) 6133415. Updates on the case can be found on the Find Holly White Facebook page, which Graves administrates. White’s family is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to her safe return. Taos County Crime Stoppers has put up a $1,000 reward.